Ice Cube wants Warner Bros. to hand over ‘Friday’ rights

Ice Cube is through playing games with Warner Bros., at least when it comes to the Friday franchise. Ice Cube and DJ Pooh wrote the first installment of Friday, which was released in 1995. At the same time, the other two movies, Next Friday (2000) and 2002’s Friday After Next, were written solely by Ice Cube. 

On Dec. 2, the legendary rapper revealed a list of demands he wants from the production company during a recent interview on Mike Tyson’s podcast Hotboxin with Mike Tyson. This includes giving him the Friday franchise’s legal rights and to stop delaying the film’s fourth installment, allegedly titled Last Friday.

When guest co-host and former basketball player Matt Barnes asked Ice Cube if fans would ever get to see Last Friday, the “It Was a Good Day” emcee said, at the 37:01 mark, he’s unsure because of how Warner Brothers studio is acting towards him and the project. 

“I don’t know. Warner Brothers is weird right now. I don’t know what they’re doing, they don’t know what they’re doing. We’d love to have it back. I think it’s going to be close to a time when we get it back. So, we’ll either wait for that time, or we’ll keep trying to convince them that they need to let us control the movie. It’s my movie, but they have distribution control.”

Immediately following Ice Cube’s response, Tyson suggested that he buys back the franchise, to which the 53-year-old quipped, 

“I ain’t putting s–t up for it. F— no.They need to give it to me, and they gon’ make money. I’m not about to pay for my own stuff, that’s stupid … They need to do the right thing, get it to us, let us turn it into more money, and make the fans happy … We can do a lot with it.”

Towards the end of the conversation, Ice Cube revealed that he had written two scripts, one before and one after the passing of Friday stars John Witherspoon and Tommy Lister Jr. but Warner Brothers studio continued to give him the runaround. Witherspoon played Pops, Ice Cube’s father, in the movies. Lister portrayed the role of the neighborhood bully Debo. Witherspoon died in 2019, while Lister passed away the following year. 

Since then, no additional details have been released at this time.